


we wait for the sunrise

by flowermasters



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: (aka what we deserved to see), Coda, Cuddling, Episode Related, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Past Child Abuse, post 6x04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-20 14:49:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18994780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowermasters/pseuds/flowermasters
Summary: He never wants to see her walk away from him again. He certainly never wants to see her walk away from himbecauseof him again. Post-6x04.





	we wait for the sunrise

**Author's Note:**

> This is short and (hopefully) a little sweet. I have feelings.
> 
> Warnings for: mentions of past child abuse, mentions of recreational alcohol abuse.

The room they’ve been allotted is as overdecorated as the rest of Sanctum, most of the space taken up by a bed piled high with brightly-colored embroidered pillows. There’s a small attached bathroom and a chest for what meager belongings they have. Someone’s left a pitcher of what looks to be wine sitting on a wooden table in the corner. Bellamy is used to the utilitarian grimness of the Ark, the clothes hardly worth the effort it took to patch them and the furniture bolted to the floor, and he has more than a little familiarity with the hardscrabble life cobbled together by the Grounders. The ceremony of life on this deadly moon unnerves him, and he knocks several pillows to the floor with a sweep of his arm.

Echo is drunk and needy, her mouth at his neck and her hands fidgeting with the hem of his shirt. He shivers, allows this for a moment, then kisses her and stills her hands. “Let’s go to bed, huh?”

“Uh-huh,” she says, voice low, breath sticky.

He smiles a little, fond. She’s never been particularly eloquent when she has sex in mind, and the alcohol probably isn’t helping. He feels sober and tender and very, very tired as they move apart.

They’ve been given pajamas to wear, a shirt and loose-fitting pants for Bellamy and a light nightdress for Echo. She looks beautiful in it, all legs, but that’s not why his heart aches as she crosses the room unsteadily to put out the light. In bed he pulls her close again; even the distance between them as they got in on opposite sides was too much. He’s spent too much time apart from her in the past few weeks, time during which either one of them could have died. He never wants to see her walk away from him again. He certainly never wants to see her walk away from him _because_ of him again.

She hooks a leg over his legs, resting her head on his shoulder, and he lets his left hand settle comfortably on her knee. “Feeling alright?” he asks.

“My head spins, a little,” she admits, and then, “I’m sorry.”

“Sweetheart,” Bellamy says, preemptive.

“No, I am,” she says, urgent, lifting her head to look at him as best she can in the darkness. Her eyes are large and dark, her face moonlike. “I shouldn’t have—I didn’t mean. To bring that up.”

 _That_. That awful, awful thing she’s kept inside for decades. He wonders, as he had when she told him, if she’s managed to keep it hidden even from herself; if her words from years ago, _I don’t remember anything about my parents_ , weren’t a lie but a tightly-held belief. What you don’t acknowledge can’t hurt you. Bellamy knows that well enough.

“I’m glad you did,” Bellamy says, even though he isn’t, entirely—could never be glad to hear her talk about something that brings her pain. Still, he hopes it’s a bit like drawing the poison out of a wound; painful, but necessary. “I want to know everything about you, you know that. Everything you’ll share with me.”

“I’ll tell you anything,” Echo says, not in her usual frank, blunt way, but shyly, tucking her face against his collarbone. “I’ll give you anything.”

“I know,” Bellamy says, and his eyes are hot with tears again, so he blinks the wetness back quickly. “Who would have guessed you’d be a soppy drunk, huh?”

Echo huffs, amused, and Bellamy kisses the top of her head with joy for the sound. “I’ve never been drunk before. Not like this.”

This he knew; they’ve talked about it before, on the occasions when Bellamy would think longingly of a nice, disgusting cup of moonshine to take the edge off. They were all long days on the Ring, but some were longer than others. Echo has had alcohol before, at feasts and ceremonies, but she’s always had to hold herself back, could never afford the loss of control. Apparently she needed that loss of control tonight; it aches to remember that his words were what pushed her to it.

Her teacher drugged her during her training, she’d told him once. When she was a child. A little girl, and they gave her jobi nuts, had her fight while out of her mind and barely able to put one foot in front of the other. A test, she’d told him, and one she passed. _I passed every test_ , she’d said, her expression a study in neutrality. Bellamy clenches his teeth.

Her lips brush his jaw as if to soothe him. “We should drink again some time,” she says. Definitely trying to soothe him, then, to put his mind on things other than how they tortured her. Too good to him, by half, and too practiced at avoiding things for her own good. But then, she has a lifetime’s worth of practice at not thinking about that. “Get drunk and—have fun, like they do. Dance and be silly.”

“Yeah,” Bellamy agrees. He could tease her for wanting to be silly, but he won’t. He wants to see her be silly, someday, when they don’t have to worry about what tomorrow will bring. Silly and happy and his girl. “But we can do that on our own.”

Or with the others, Raven and Emori and Murphy and—well. There’s nobody else, now, that he can truly say he trusts without question, without hesitation. Just them. Maybe Jordan, Miller and Jackson, maybe Clarke again someday, but just as easily maybe not.

Echo hums in agreement. “This place is strange,” she says. “And not just the planet itself.”

“Yeah,” Bellamy says, staring up at the darkness that is the ceiling, vaulted unnecessarily but beautifully high above them. He thinks of the ceremony they watched, of the strange, stilted manner of the people here. He thinks of the outsiders in the woods, and of Octavia left to her own devices out there with them. Left there by him; a responsibility, a sister, abandoned to die.

“You said we should look forward,” Echo says, pensive, mercifully interrupting his thoughts. “But I wonder ...”

“If there’s a future for us here?” Bellamy finishes, and she nods. Her hair tickles his neck. “Me, too.”

They’ve talked about that future before, what it might look like, although not at great length. It wasn’t always a pleasant topic of discussion on the Ring; they weren’t always sure they’d get a chance at it. But they’ve talked vaguely about farming, about having a place of their own, living close to the others. About children.

But that was always meant to happen on Earth. Here, all bets are off.

“There has to be,” Echo says, tucking herself closer to his side, though there’s barely any space between them to begin with. His right arm is falling asleep under her neck, but Bellamy’s been dealt worse pain than that. He strokes the skin of her knee lightly with his thumb and feels her shiver, but lazily, sleepily. “Monty and Harper gave us this future, and I trust them.”

Not _trusted_ ; not past tense. For all that Jordan smiles just like Harper, with his eyes that glint with mischief like Monty’s, it still feels as though they’ve just—left the room. Like they’ll all be together again soon. But they died for this, for their family and for Jordan and for everyone to have this future.

“It’s up to us not to waste it,” Bellamy says.

“We won’t,” Echo says, drunk and tired enough to sound certain of it. He’s not sure how certain she really is; he’ll have to ask her in the morning.

Tomorrow, then—the immediate future must be dealt with first. Their hosts, with all of their oddities. The outsiders. Octavia. All relative unknowns, for the time being.

Their real future, the future they want, awaits. Bellamy has to believe that. Has to.

So he kisses the top of Echo’s head again, and she lifts her head to sleepily kiss his mouth. She’s rinsed out her mouth with sweet-scented mouthwash from the bathroom, but beneath that there’s the faint taste of whiskey, and _then_ there’s the taste of Echo, familiar and warm. When their lips part, it lingers like a balm.


End file.
